by Michael Komape’s mother carried her other child on her back and rushed to the primary school as soon as the team was called. Her son had gone missing, teachers said.
The five-year-old was nowhere to be found, until a small school student made an unexpected statement.
Michael had fallen in the toilet, said the little boy. While searching where the boy had pointed, the teachers saw Michael’s dead hand visible in the pit of human waste under the broken toilets.
“I then said my child died asking for help,” Michael’s mother told a trial for damages three years later.
The death of Michael Komape in 2014 in a school pit latrine near Polokwane, in the Limpopo province, shocked South Africa.
Because thousands of schools still had such dangerous toilets more than twenty years after the end of apartheid, it became another symbol of inequality in a country full of diversity.
Consisting of a toilet seat placed over a hole in the ground, some pit toilets are well built and meet new standards, but many are not and are dangerous and unsanitary.
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has vowed to change the worst of them by 2016.
Instead, ten years after Michael’s death and with the target date long gone, more than 3,932 schools – or 17 per cent – still have unacceptable pit toilets, according to human rights campaign groups that track the issue.
Some of these schools have a mix of acceptable and unacceptable toilets, but 728 schools have nothing but those that should be banned and replaced with new ones.
Such toilets are often ramshackle efforts made by the local community. They are dirty, unsafe and the youngest children are at risk of falling in. They can be so bad that children prefer to leave school and relieve themselves outside in a woodland or bush.
“There is a risk to life, but these toilets are often in a disgraceful state,” says Motheo Brodie, a solicitor candidate with the Section 27 campaign group.
“They are completely unsanitary and a threat to the health of the learners. In some cases, these toilets are so broken that they have no doors at all.”
Such toilets in schools in big towns and rural areas are a powerful example not only of inequality, but of the government’s failure to tackle it.
South Africa is the most unequal country in the world according to the rankings of a statistical measure known as the Gini coefficient, which assesses how income is distributed across the population.
The haves have many, the middle class is relatively small, and there are very few. Around 18 million people in South Africa survive on less than £1.50 a day. Unemployment is rising by 30 percent.
Campaigners say the problem is shaped by the country’s history, but not helped by the current government.
The most deprived areas in 2024 were also deprived under apartheid.
But the ANC is also to blame. For 30 years in power, the party has been accused of failing to make changes; being held back by his own lack of will, mismanagement and corruption.
As voters go to the polls in May to elect the government, the failure of the ANC to alleviate such inequality and even provide basic services will be high on the minds of many poor voters.
“The fact that pit latrines still exist is a huge reflection of inequality in South Africa,” says Amnesty International’s Cassandra Dorasamy.
“It is difficult not to say that it is a lack of political will on the part of the government, and at the same time to admit that these problems have deep roots in the legacy system of apartheid.
“But if you look at how budgets are being cut, or underspending, there are post-apartheid delays in delivery.”
Mr Brodie said central government had provided money to replace dangerous pit toilets, but local government dysfunction meant it was not spent.
He said: “They’ve had 30 years and certainly more could be done.
“Education is one of the most highly funded sectors in the country. Money has been allocated to eradicate pit latrines, but we see underspending by education departments. Lack of resources cannot be blamed for more progress being made.
“It’s really a lack of political will, given that this is such a timely issue.”
Litigation under Section 27, a public interest law center based in Johannesburg, forced Limpopo province, where Michael Komape died, to set targets for the removal of pit latrines. The province has reduced the number of schools using unacceptable toilets, but missed another deadline last year to remove them completely.
Other provinces are moving more slowly to remove them.
For the past month President Cyril Ramaphosa has been praising the achievements of the ANC over the past 30 years, ahead of the poll on 29 May.
Political commentators widely predict that he faces an uphill struggle as the country faces its most important election in decades.
The party is expected to lose a clear majority for the first time since being voted in due to a grudge against the ANC, with rolling power cuts, crumbling infrastructure, an anemic economy, lack of services, and persistent corruption.
If the party fails to take 50 percent of the vote, it will end its three-decade run of total dominance and usher in a new, uncertain era of coalition politics.
Convincing poor voters that the ANC has worked for their benefit and made improvements over the past 30 years will be key to the party’s electoral strategy.
However, the country’s school pit latrines are just one example of where they have not achieved much.
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